Had I but world enough and time, I would finish every book that I started, just in case something I wasn’t enjoying transformed into something I’d be glad to have read.

But…

…I’m sixty-eight. I feel like I’ll soon be setting off the proximity alarms on Time’s Wingèd Chariot. I don’t have the luxury of sticking with books that bore me or offend me or disappoint me or just don’t do anything to make me want to read the next page. So I’m getting stricter about setting books aside.

This week, I have two set asides. I bought both of them this year and had high hopes for them.

I added ‘Rules Of Prey‘ to my TBR pile because John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport series is frequently recommended by Stephen King, including his latest novel, ‘Never Flinch‘, where one of the characters (not at all a nice man) was reading ‘Toxic Prey‘, the thirty-fourth book in the series. I mean, thirty-four books and still going wrong AND a Stephen King recommendation. It had to be good, didn’t it?

I decided to start at the beginning, with the first Lucas Davenport book, ‘Rules Of Prey’ published in 1989. 

I almost didn’t make it past chapter one. The psychopath’s relish in abducting, raping, torturing and murdering women was overwhelming and had far too much of the ‘It’s not my fault I’m like this and besides, killing women feel so good. You get that, don’t you?‘ feel to it.

I thought things would get better when I met Davenport, except, if I hadn’t met the killer in the first chapter, Davenport would have been my prime suspect. He’s clever, rich, manipulative, transactional, an obsessive games player, drives a Porsche to work and has almost no long-term relationships. 

The atmosphere was saturated with the sleazy taken-for-granted racism/sexism/macho crap that passed for normal in 1989. I used the ‘of its time’ excuse for that but that didn’t explain the relish that Sandford seemed to take in delivering the sleaze and gave Davenport brownie points for being able to press all the right white alpha male buttons.

Still, the storytelling was lean and purposeful so I stuck with it.

Things got worse and worse. We had a serial killer playing games with the place to decide who had the biggest dick and using women as game pieces. How much fun is that?

Davenport was presented as one of the best detectives because he’s a bright, rule-breaking loner who is willing to use anyone, especially women to get his job done. He’s dispassionate. He has insight without empathy. He didn’t hesitate to assault a survivor of attempted rape in order to improve her recall of events. He lies fluently and often. But he wears nice clothes, bets on the right horses, designs cool games and sleeps with good-looking women so I guess he really is a hero. 

I set this aside at 35% today, I was tired of all the macho/sexist crap. I was flipping betwee being offended and being bored. The whole point of the story seemed to be to watch Davenport flexing his intellect to catch the psycho killer in a game both of them were likely to enjoy. The women in the story seemed to be there only so that the killer and Davenport could have objects to play their game with. I have better things to do with my time.

I thought ‘In The Blink Of An Eye’(2023) the first book in this series about a detective working with a prototype AI Hologram partner was a wonderful read.. It had edge-of-the-seat moments of tension, a satisfying mystery, well-founded speculations on the use of AI in the near future and a deeply empathetic understanding of grief and loss.

I’d hope for the same quality, with some development of the main characters and of the use of AI, in the second book. 

I set the book aside today at 56%. I actually got that far back in March. I decided to set the book aside because I hadn’t picked it up in weeks. 

So what was the problem? There were three of them.

Firstly, where the previous book was about finding an at-risk missing person, this one was about finding a serial killer. We don’t have many serial killers in the UK. I couldn’t imagine giving such a high-profile case to a not-entirely-emotionally-stable Detective and an unproven AI prototype. Also, the serial killer made this police procedural feel very generic. 

Secondly, the abilities and attributes of the AI seemed less well-founded than in the first book. I could imagine an AI pulling together the data to find a missing person. I couldn’t see an AI being able to predict the behaviour of a serial killer. 

Thirdly, the pace was flagging towards the middle of the book Things should have been tense by then but they weren’t. I think everything just felt too impersonal.

So I’ve set this aside and taken the third book, ‘Human Remains‘ off my Wishlist.